GUARDIAN OF THE SCHOENBERG FLAME

By Allan Kozinn

Published: March 10, 1985

Allan Kozinn is a frequent contributor of articles on music and musicians.

''Roughly speaking,'' the French conductor, composer and teacher Jacques-Louis Monod calculated, ''my experience has proved that you need at least one hour of rehearsal for every minute of music. Less than that, and you cannot do justice to the piece. You also need good players - ideally, I prefer musicians who have worked together, and who have worked with me before. I have a very short fuse when I have to waste time on elementary things. And if possible, I like to use my own marked scores and parts. I'm talking about an ethical approach to performing, and the conditions that justify the performance of a work. If someone asks me to conduct, but cannot give me the conditions I need, well, it's very easy for me to live without conducting.''

It's almost needless to add that Mr. Monod doesn't conduct much these days; but as one of the world's few practicing specialists in the music of the Second Viennese School, his services are frequently sought by ensembles that want to play that genre's central works. This month, Mr. Monod will emerge for two performances: Tuesday evening, at Columbia University's McMillin Theater, he will conduct Speculum Musicae in Arnold Schoenberg's Suite (Op.29), a work he describes as ''a virtuoso demonstration of Bach's influence on Schoenberg. There is no device Bach used that Schoenberg doesn't use here - invertible counterpoint, augmentation, diminution; and the last movement is a fugue.''

On March 21, he will lead the Composer's Guild and his former wife, the soprano Bethany Beardslee, in Schoenberg's ''Pierrot Lunaire,'' at Merkin Hall. ''It's interesting,'' he observes with a dodecaphonist's eye for numbers, ''that the concert is on 3/21; 'Pierrot' contains 21 pieces divided into three parts.''

Mr. Monod realizes that a large part of the classical music audience still rebels against the 12-tone style, but that doesn't bother him. ''My job,'' he says, ''is not to deal with the audience. My job is to deal with the piece. But I do not believe that Schoenberg's contributions to composition were a revolution. I don't believe that there is any such thing as a revolution in art. Nor do I believe,'' he adds with a blend of vehemence and patience, ''that Schoenberg meant his music to be atonal. If you listen carefully, you realize that a kind of tonality emerges from the way the 12-tones are arranged. The Suite, for instance, has a primary tonality of E flat. In fact, the bass notes of the first statement of the material are E flat, A flat, B flat, E flat; and you can't get closer than that to I-IV-V-I (a traditional harmonic progression) in the key of E-flat major.

''So, I believe that Schoenberg saw a tonality within the 12-tone series; but I don't think this aspect of his music has been seen, and I doubt even more that the performance of his music has been based on wishing, wanting and trying to make this kind of articulation clear. Why? Because it is quite natural that what is profound takes longer to be acknowledged than what is superficial. Not that there is anything superficial in Schoenberg. But the standard approach to performance does not delve so deeply into the music that we can perceive the links between 12-tone writing and other kinds of tonality.''

Mr. Monod's interest in the Second Viennese School developed when he was a music student in Paris, in the mid-1940's. Born in 1927, he entered the Paris Conservatoire when he was 8 years old; but by the time he was 16, he had become disenchanted with nearly every aspect of the school's curriculum.

The only class he enjoyed was Olivier Messiaen's analysis and esthetics course. ''Messiaen'' he recalls, ''was the only teacher who bothered to show us actual scores. The others gave us only exercises. It was training in becoming a virtuoso at a certain kind of exercise.'' In 1944, though, his imagination was sparked by Rene Leibowitz, a Warsaw-born student of Schoenberg and Webern - as the conductor puts it, ''the guru of the 10 or 15 people who wanted to know about that kind of music.''

After making a debut, as a pianist, in a Schoenberg concert in 1949, Mr. Monod accompanied his teacher to New York, where he studied further at Juilliard and Columbia. In 1951, he conducted the first all-Webern and Berg concerts in the United States; and before returning to Europe, in 1955, he toured the country as a pianist and conductor. He also made the first recordings of several Second Viennese School works. After a brief period of further conducting study in Germany, he moved to England and conducted for the BBC during the first seven years of the 1960's.

''But then,'' he says, ''I realized that going after a conducting career was a way of losing one's life without having time to read a book or do anything else. I decided life was too short for all that jazz.'' So he moved back to the United States and took up a succession of teaching jobs - among them, posts at the New England Conservatory, Hunter College, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and Queens College.